


Kidney Punch

by basaltgrrl



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-14
Updated: 2010-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-15 10:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basaltgrrl/pseuds/basaltgrrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>confrontation and violence, and the consequences of a kidney punch gone wrong</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kidney Punch

  
  
  
  
**Entry tags:**   
|   
[character: sam](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/character%3A%20sam), [fic](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/fic), [genre: hurt/comfort](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/genre%3A%20hurt%2Fcomfort), [rating: green cortina](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/rating%3A%20green%20cortina)  
  
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_**Kidney Punch - revised and expanded! Now with LOADS more hurt/comfort action!**_  
Title: Kidney Punch  
Word Count: 3035  
Rating: Green cortina, for violence?  
Summary: confrontation and violence, and the consequences of a kidney punch gone wrong

Originally inspired by a google search on "kidney punch", and learning how damaging and painful a kidney punch can be.  The revision and expansion inspired by interest in the story - I hope all you guys enjoy it!  Sam whumpage!

Two things:  many thanks to thesmallhobbit for brit-picking excellence!  And this morning it occurred to me that the story needs an epilogue, so that will be coming up.

 

Kidney Punch

 

Sam sat in the waiting room, fiddling with his wallet and trying very hard not to think about going to the loo.  It was terribly difficult just now.  He had been twenty times this morning if he had been once, and it was a less pleasant experience each time.  The dull throb of pain in his lower back was constant, with the occasional spike when he moved wrong.  He wondered if it was possible to have this much imaginary discomfort while lying in a coma, and then wondered if that proved or disproved _anything_.

“Sam Tyler?” the nurse in the doorway called.

He raised his hand, grimaced, and followed her down the hall to an consultation room.  “Doctor Wentworth will be in shortly,” she informed him, and left him once again to his thoughts.  Just now it was hard to think about anything except the pain in his back and the fact that there had been blood in his urine for the past three days.  He figured it was a kidney infection – not that he had any previous experience with such, but by process of deduction it seemed a safe conclusion.  It scared him more than he wanted to admit, dealing with a potentially serious illness in this day and age.  He almost thought he had waited too long already, but his warring impulses had stayed his hand – fears of doctors and disability wandering the halls of his restless mind.

The door opened and a tall, graying man with a craggy face entered.  “Doctor Wentworth,” he said with a smile.  “Mr. Tyler?  Nice to meet you.  So what seems to be the problem?”

“Uh, I’ve been experiencing a dull pain – lower back.  For the last three days, and it’s getting worse.  Also I’ve had blood in my urine.”

“Have you been drinking plenty of water?” Wentworth fixed him with a doubtful eye.  “Plenty of liquids of any sort?”

“Yeah.  Haven’t gone without, anyway.”  A mental image of ranks of pint glasses filled his mind.

“Suffered a blow to the back?”

And suddenly Sam was suffused with… what?  Anger?  Because he had honestly not connected the events until that moment, but there had been a particularly vicious jab to his kidney three days ago, courtesy of one Gene Hunt, DCI.  Something must have shown on his face, because the doctor leaned forward fractionally with an expectant look.

“Uh, yeah.  I… tripped and fell backward.  Hit a desk.  Hadn’t thought much about it, but yeah.”  It sounded lame and incriminating to Sam’s ears; and why should he try to hide the truth?  Because it felt incredibly wrong to say, “Yeah, my boss deals out physical abuse on a regular basis?”  It was not as if this doctor would then turn Hunt in to the authorities.  Not here, not now.  Even had Sam talked to the police superintendent the worst that could happen would be a verbal reprimand.

“We’ll have to wait for the results of your urinalysis to be sure, but the blow to the back would indicate to me that you have a probable bruised kidney, and possible resultant infection.  I’m writing you a prescription for penicillin…” his pen scribbled busily, “and you should rest for a few days.  Come back to see me if the pain doesn’t get any better.  The pain is bad?  I’ll write you a prescription for morphine, if you can’t sleep.”

Again Sam’s face must have said something without words, because Wentworth’s brows drew together in concern.  “You haven’t been sleeping?”

Sam frowned.  “I’m not a great sleeper.  Doesn’t have anything to do with the kidney.”

“Still.  It might without you knowing it.  Here – the prescription.  There’s a chemist’s on Church Street where you can fill these.”

Sam took the scraps of paper with a weird feeling of shame that he didn’t want to try to analyse just now.  “Thank you, doctor.”

It was a matter of half an hour to get the prescriptions, and then he was on to work, just a couple of hours later than usual.

“Tyler,” came the familiar bark as he walked to his desk.  “What took you so long?”

“Doctor.”  He sat, watched Gene saunter across the room.

“What for?”

“Had something that needed treating.”

“Details, Gladys.  I need details.”  And then Hunt was standing beside his desk, with his crackling physical presence, and Sam looked inside himself for reaction, wondering if this really was physical abuse or emotional intimidation or some variety thereof – and he found no fear, no trauma.  This man had hurt him, but he didn’t feel like a victim.  He didn’t need protecting, whether by a doctor or internal investigations.  It was very odd to think of it this way, but the violent physical contact actually made him feel more alive than he had in years.  For what it was worth?  Was he not afraid because he didn’t believe this was real, or because he honestly didn’t mind a little beating?

He grinned.  “The less you know the better, Guv.  All taken care of.”

And miraculously Gene accepted that explanation, distracted, perhaps by an outcry across the room as Chris entered waving a photo of a very buxom woman wearing a very tight red dress.

 

Sam woke the next morning with a leaden exhaustion and the sense that his brain had been stuffed.  When he got to work he felt distinctly slow; there was a lot of activity related to a series of armed blags, and he made several phone calls and then sat at his desk with the disturbing awareness that he didn’t remember a thing he had said.

News came in on a lead and they charged out as a team to a chemist’s shop on the west side of town.  They were met by chaos; a milling crowd in the street, one man bleeding on the kerb, shouts and crashes from inside the shop.

Gene was out of the Cortina and across the pavement before Sam could lever himself from his seat.  “You lot!”  Gene barked at a couple of uniformed policemen.  “Over there!  Cordon this off.  Let’s get the crowd back!”

Sam rushed after Ray and Chris, who had hurried off without a backward glance.  It was well enough to clear the passersby from the scene, but what was going on inside the building?  Gene was consulting with a trio of policemen by the door.

“—shots from inside,” Sam heard one of them saying.  “At least ten shots.  We think there’s a single shooter.”

“You two go watch the back exit,” Gene ordered.  “We’ll scout out the front, try to make contact with the suspect.”

“Guv! “  Sam exclaimed against his better judgment.  “We don’t want to make a frontal assault, unless you want someone killed!  Wait for Armed Response, for god’s sake!”

Gene reached under his jacket, extracted a pistol.  “You’re lookin’ at it.”

“You gotta be joking me.”

“Nope.  DI Tyler, do you want to negotiate with the shooter?”  There was something mocking and confrontational in Gene’s tone.

“I think it would be appropriate,” Sam answered with gritted teeth.  He still felt odd, felt a little too distant from it all.  The wool in his brain made the entire scene just a fraction less real, the colors like a picture on the telly.

Gene made a magnanimous gesture toward the shop door.

Sam approached along the sidewalk, keeping at least partially shielded by the trim of the doorway.  “Excuse me,” he called.  “Police!  What are you hoping to accomplish?”

There was a crash from within the storefront.  “Go away!”

“We want you to come out safely,” Sam yelled back.  “What do you need, in order for that to happen?”

“Money!”

Another voice yelled, “Bastard big bags of it!”

There was a scuffle and then silence.  Sam risked a glimpse around the corner -  two shadowy figures bent in consultation.  He thought they seemed uncertain, or young, or foolish—at least if this was a novel that’s what they would be, and he would talk them down with his magnificent reasoning.  But at the moment he just couldn’t think of what to say.

“What makes you think you’re going to get bags of money?” he yelled.

“We get money or we kill ‘er!”

“Her?”  And then Sam saw Gene approaching the storefront from the other side, gun at the ready, Ray at his side, and he waved them back with urgency.  Gene gave him a tight-lipped glare and a headshake.

“Drop your weapons!” he snarled as he stepped in front of the plate glass window.  It all happened quite rapidly after that; gunshots, glass breaking, a single scream from within the shop.  And then Gene and Ray were rushing through the door and Sam was still standing in the road with his head spinning.

Ray was cuffing the second suspect when Sam stalked in.  The first man was seated with a hand to his bleeding shoulder.  There was no hostage as far as he could see.

“Gene,” he spat.  “Didn’t you hear what they were saying?  There could have been a third person – you could have shot her!”

“Tyler!  Shut it!”

Sam turned away, face flushing, and thought to himself, “Fuck it.”  He stalked down the back hall to the loo and was washing his hands with brisk, infuriated efficiency when Gene slammed into the gents behind him.

He knew what was going to happen only a millisecond before it occurred – read it in Gene’s expression, perhaps, or in the restrained violence of his walk.  Sam cringed away, but Gene’s fist lashed out and agony exploded through Sam’s back as his vision went red.

He was somewhat aware of dropping to the floor like a rock, his head just barely missing the sink, and then writhing in helpless disability.

“Tyler!”  Hands patted his face, cradled his head off the floor, and then felt down the length of his body.  He cracked his eyes open, making a wheezing moan that hardly seemed human.  The pain flared and contracted, stabbing specifically in his back and then spiking out to the extremes of his body.  He spasmed.  “What’s wrong???” Gene demanded.

“K-k-kidney,” Sam choked out.  He fumbled for his pocket with a shaking hand but couldn’t open the flap.  He floated on an absolute sea of pain, wishing for a quiet swell of relief.

“What?”

“Kidney!”  Gene reached into the pocket and pulled out the bottle of morphine pills.

The pain just did not seem willing to let go; the sea had no boundaries.  Sam arched backwards in fresh agony, moaning.

“Raymondo!” Gene turned to yell.  He seemed huge, crouching over Sam.  “Ray!  Help me!”  He pressed Sam’s hand with his own in a shockingly tender gesture.  “Alright, Sam.  I didn’t know.  You never told me.”

To his fury and frustration Sam felt tears tracking down the sides of his face.  “It hurts so much,” he managed to whimper as an excuse.

“Alright.  ‘Ere, we’ll give yeh two of these,” Gene opened the pill bottle, fetched a glass and lifted Sam by the shoulders.  He groaned helplessly, but it really didn’t hurt any more than everything else.

“There.  There,” Gene murmured as Sam succeeded in taking a gulp of water.  It was perhaps the worst pain he had ever felt in his life, discounting a few broken bones when shock had taken the edge off almost immediately.  He twisted in Gene’s arms, groaning, and got a death-grip on an arm of the camelhair coat.  For some reason this seemed like the most comfort he could possibly get at this moment, even though Gene was the one who had inflicted this pain.  But there was no room for understanding, only the feel of Gene’s arms around him as agony swelled and ebbed.  The pain and the pressure, and the feel and the smell; it was all so absolutely consuming.

“Fuck -- Gene, I – can’t…”    Ah.  The pain crashed, but more distantly.  He closed his eyes again and waited.  Everything was more distant.  He relaxed into it.

There were voices.  Some familiar, some not.  There was movement.  He knew things were happening, things that involved him intimately and he wanted to participate, he really did, but just opening his eyes took more effort than seemed possible.

He opened his eyes.  The ceiling of the Cortina, drab vinyl.  A rocking motion.

“Stay with me, Sam,” Gene said, but his sounded so distant; on the other side of the sea, really.

“’m here,” Sam whispered.

“Stay,” Gene commanded.

And then it all slipped away.

 

-#-

 

His mouth was dry.  Someone had muffled everything, and his mouth was dry.  He made a noise, a grunt, and shifted a hand.

“Sam?”

He opened his eyes, blinked until the room came into focus.  Hospital.  Gene was at the bedside.  A wan daylight crept through the curtains, painting the shadows under Gene’s eyes.  The smell was antiseptic and stale, cigarette smoke and a hint of fake flowers.

“You poncy git.  Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t well?”  The words were scolding but the tone wasn’t; it was dry and worn and in need of six cups of coffee.

“Saw… doctor.”  Sam shrugged.

“You had a ruptured kidney, you twonk.  Or you did after I punched it.  You’re lucky they managed to save it or you’d be down to one.”

Sam closed his eyes.  “Why does it matter?”

“I don’t set out to hurt you, Tyler – you drive me to it with your attitude.”

Sam’s lips twitched in a bitter smile.  “Oh yes.  I was… positively asking for it.”

“Well you were!”

“In what universe does ‘standing up for my principles’ mean ‘beat the crap out of me’?”

“Most of ‘em as far as I know.”

They both lapsed into silence.

“So they had to operate on me?”

“Not half.  You were bleedin’ internally.  Had the impression it were touch n’ go there for a while, but then here y’are, two kidneys and all.”  Gene leaned back in his chair, fumbled out a cigarette and lit it.  As the first plumes wreathed his head he continued, “And now that I know my DI will remain in the land of the living, I’d like to know how to keep him there.  Will you tell me things I need to know in the future, you annoying git, or are yer gonna just roll over?”

Sam sighed.  “So you want _me_ to tell _you_ when not to hit me.”

“No.”  A deep breath, a cloud of smoke.  “God’s sake, Tyler.  I want genuine communication.  I want you to give in if I’m right, and not keep going yer own way.  I want to feel like I’m making an impression.  I want to feel like we’re working toward the same goal, Sammy-boy.  Half the time I think yer goal _is_ to drive me mad.”

Sam snorted, tried to choke back his mirth as pains reawakened all through his body.  “I drive _you_ mad?  If you knew… if you only knew.”

“I am your superior officer.”

“Do you want me to be a nice little toady?”

“I want a team member, Samantha.  A team member who doesn’t push my buttons every damn day.”

Sam grimaced.  “Don’t know if I can promise that, Guv.  Clearly, the button-pushing is unintentional.”

“Is it?”  Gene took a long drag, contemplated Sam through the haze and the bar of sunlight.

“For fuck’s sake!  I’m just trying to do my job!”  The anger was flushing the drugs and sleep from his system; Sam could feel the lethargy being replaced with a generalized nausea and a cool sheen of sweat.  It felt like the same old story, facing Gene down through the smoke.   But how funny was that, really, and hadn’t Gene just pushed Sam’s buttons with his disbelief?  Disbelief.  Belief.  The core of the issue, really.

“You are my Detective Inspector, Tyler.  And I am your Chief.  Does that not imply that your job is to assist me in investigations?”

“But—I gotta do what I think is right…”

“Points for determination, but consider the end result.  Someone almost died yesterday.  And then you—“

“There are times when I’m right.”

“Yes.”

Sam blinked.  “Did you just--?”

“Agree with you?  Yes.  But there are times when _I’m_ right.  Go ahead and nod, if you’re too weak to speak, Gladys.”

Sam settled back into his pillow and blinked again, feeling the flush of exhaustion and pain and weariness with the work.  What was the point?  Was there a point?  Why did he bother struggling with this shite, this 1973 bullshit?  Of course the reason was sitting by his bedside puffing cigarette smoke, rubbing his own tired eyes.  Yes.

“Mmm,” he said.  “There are times you’re right.”

Gene leaned forward in his chair, giving Sam a stern look.  “You are due for your next round of pills.”

“Mmm, I am.”

 “You’re to stay here and do everything they tell you to.  Very difficult for you, I know, but give it a try.  And I am needed back at the station.”  He levered himself out of the chair.  Something about the hitch in his movement as he straightened up made Sam curious.

“How long?”

“Eh?”

“How long have you been here?”

Gene gave a grimace that might have been a smile.  “Why do you care, Tyler?  You were dead to the world for most of it.”  Another quirk of his mouth.  “Almost dead to the world, period.”  He took a step closer to the bed, patted Sam’s limp hand.  “And I’m glad to know that my vigil was not a death watch.  Get better, Sam.”

He walked out the door.  Sam stared after him.  Gave the nurse a wan smile when she bustled in moments later. 

“Alright, love?”  She offered the pills and a glass of water.  Accepted his pills, and offered up his arm for a needle.

And all the time, as a wave of relief and sleep washed over him, he felt it.  Felt that the sheet under his hand was real, the needle in his arm, the sunlight through the window.  The man, who had left the room in a swirl of cigarette smoke and musk.  This was as real as anything.  For now.


End file.
